Elemental Shaman Midnight Talents Guide

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The Shaman talent tree offers a lot of utility, but also a fair bit of throughput and defensive improvements that are mandatory to take.

Throughput Talents

Spiritwalker's Grace - The most important talent for damage in the class tree. Casting while moving is a massive benefit and having Evokers in your raid that can provide Time Spiral for extra casts is a game changer. Should always be improved with Graceful Spirit.

Gust Of Wind - Burst movement is always handy and can save you in a pinch, this is the default choice.

Spirit Walk - The alternative to Gust Of Wind is less universally useful but has the ability to remove all movement impairing effects that can help negate certain mechanics that slow or root.

Enhanced Imbues - Makes your Improved Flametongue Weapon provide more Fire damage and Thunderstrike Ward to deal more damage.

Nature's Swiftness - Grants an instant cast once a minute. Vary minor gain but mandatory when playing as Farseer thanks to Ancestral Swiftness summoning an Ancestor.

Fire And Ice, Spiritual Awakening & Nature's Fury - Self explanatory damage increases. You always want to play these.

Instinctive Imbuements - A passive 3% intellect increase that also makes you only have to press a single button to refresh shields and imbues. 3% intellect is massive, always take this.

Defensive Talents

Astral Shift - Our staple defensive spell that can be further improved with either Planes Traveler or Astral Bulwark. Planes Traveler is the default choice since most of the time 40% damage reduction is enough to survive most things.

Earth Elemental - When modified by Primordial Bond increases maximum health by 15% for 30 seconds. This does however mean that it no longer taunts and doesn’t help with distracting mobs if a tank dies in Mythic+.

Earth Shield - Improved by both Elemental Orbit and Therazane's Resilience is a must-have combination that provides an Earth Shield to both you and another player without ever losing charges.

Brimming With Life, Elemental Warding & Nature's Guardian - Passive increases to survivability that should always be taken.

Healing Stream Totem - Useful passive healing for your party/raid. A nice bonus to take if other class talents are not necessary, but this is extremely rare for dungeons and fairly uncommon for raid.

Utility Talents

It’s not possible to allocate all of these talents at the same time, pick and choose depending on what’s needed for the encounter or dungeon.

Wind Shear - The most universally useful and powerful interrupt in the game.

Capacitor Totem - Great AoE stun that can be improved with Static Charge to cast it more often. Has a 2 second delay from cast.

Earthgrab Totem - A totem that lasts 30 seconds and every 2 seconds roots enemies in its area for 8 seconds. If an enemy that’s already been rooted is hit by the totem, it suffers a 50% move speed reduction instead.

Tremor Totem - Removes fear, charm and sleep debuffs, these types of debuffs are rare so this sees little use.

Purge - Lets you remove any nasty buff the enemies apply to themselves, this ability is usually either entirely useless or incredibly powerful.

Greater Purge - Identical to Purge, but removes 2 magic buffs instead of 1. The price you pay for this is a 12 second cooldown and an additional mana cost (although this is basically irrelevant). Rarely necessary.

Cleanse Spirit - In a similar vein this is often useless but being able to remove curses is a great tool to have since it’s not that many classes that can do so.

Wind Rush Totem - Movement speed for the entire party/raid is always good to have, Jet Stream brings it closer to the power of Druid’s Stampeding Roar and can have it remove snares, and Ascending Air makes it longer and lets you use it more often.

Poison Cleansing Totem - The rate at which this dispels is unparalleled and should always be taken when there’s nasty poison debuffs.

Totemic Projection - Moves all of your currently active totems to the specified location. This lost a lot of usefulness with the removal of Liquid Magma Totem, but can still be helpful for Wind Rush Totem or Earthgrab Totem/Earthbind Totem.

Hex - Rarely used as it only works on Humanoids and Beasts, but useful if you need something to remain in place and have no other CC in your group. Casting it will not put you in combat with the target, but the target will retain its aggro range so you need to keep your distance. Improveable by Voodoo Mastery.

Earthquake - A choice node near the top of the tree. You will take Earthquake regardless of what build you play as it leads to some incredibly powerful talents, but which version to take is entirely your choice.

One option causes Earthquake to appear at your target’s feet when pressed, and the other option lets you select where it’s placed (or place it at your cursor using a macro found below, in the Macros section).

Generally speaking, I prefer targeted Earthquake to cursor, as the cognitive load saved by not having to think about where you’re placing it combined with the inability to accidentally have it clip into the ceiling/textures near the camera tends to make up for any DPS loss by losing precise placement.

Elemental Blast - A choice talent with Earth Shock at the very top of the tree. Elemental Blast has a cast time and very high maelstrom cost but provides powerful buffs to Haste, Crit and Mastery while Earth Shock is cheaper and instant, which provides much needed mobility. Generally, Elemental Blast should be taken as long as you can play around the cast time.

Stormkeeper - An iconic Elemental ability that activates our set bonus for the tier and interacts very well with Ascendance, especially in AoE where a large portion of its power comes from the overloads.

Casting Stormkeeper summons an ancestor when playing as a Farseer, and can be modified with the Fury Of The Storms/Herald Of The Storms choice node to summon a Storm Elemental for passive DPS or have a lower cooldown. Fury of the Storms is usually a better choice.

Ascendance - Elementals big cooldown provides 30% increased overload damage as well as making spells that overload do so an additional time.

Herald Of The Storms - The cooldown of Stormkeeper from this talent results in more ancestors for Farseer.

Ascendance - Elementals big cooldown provides 75% increased overload damage as well as making spells that overload do so an additional time.

First Ascendant & Preeminence - A choice of how to improve Ascendance that either makes it stronger or have shorter cooldown. This is a powerful option to have since it gives the flexibility to cater the cooldown based on each encounter. Generally speaking, First Ascendance is slightly better this tier.

Mountains Will Fall - Enables Earth Shock, Elemental Blast and Earthquake to overload with a bigger damage penalty than regular overloads.

Power Of The Maelstrom - Chain Lightning and Lightning Bolt gain a chance to grant this buff that makes your next Lava Burst deal 20% more damage, stacking twice.

Fusion Of Elements - Consuming this Power Of The Maelstrom buff triggers an Elemental Blast that only deals 40% of the damage but still grants the full effect of the buffs it provides. This allows builds that favour Earth Shock over Elemental Blast to still sometimes obtain these powerful buffs.

Master Of The Elements - If chosen over the generic Lava Burst damage talent it competes with it promotes a more varied rotation that avoids casting multiple Lava Bursts in a row and rather alternating it with other abilities, especially with the stronger ones like Elemental Blast/Earth Shock and Lightning Bolts buffed from Stormkeeper.

Voltaic Blaze - Turns Flame Shock into an AoE ability with a longer cooldown that hits up to five additional targets around the primary one. This is great for applying the debuff to many targets at once but makes it harder to keep it up on multiple targets that are far apart.

Purging Flames - Makes Voltaic Blaze also give a buff that behaves like old Primordial Wave, making the next Lava Burst also strike all other targets with Flame Shock. Also increases Lava Burst damage by 10%.

Primal Elementalist - Improves the elementals that come from both Call Of Fire and Fury Of The Storms making them far more powerful with new abilities like Meteor and Stormfury

The apex talent for Elemental is called Feedback Loop and primarily focuses on improving Elemental Overload, both through more damage and a chance to overload an additional time.

It also makes critical strikes occur more often and deal even more damage.

This apex talent doesn’t affect gameplay in any way but does have some implications on gearing since it makes both crit and mastery stronger.

Farseer and Stormbringer are the two alternative Hero Talent Trees for Elemental.

Farseer centers around spawning ancestors that cast spells when you do, with Lava Burst being the primary source of damage.

Stormbringer, on the other hand, focuses primarily on lightning and spending maelstrom to get as many casts of its signature ability, Tempest, as possible.

Farseer

Call Of The Ancestors - Stormkeeper and Ancestral Swiftness spawns a ghost that casts Lava Burst or Chain Lightning, depending on what you cast while it exists.

Ancient Fellowship - Thanks to Final Calling and Offering From Beyond, this should, on average, be better than Latent Wisdom but will have bigger variance.

Routine Communication - 8% chance to get an ancestor from Lava Burst, Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Flame Shock or Voltaic Blaze.

Heed My Call - 4 second increase means they last 50% longer and will cast far more Lava Bursts before expiring.

Final Calling - Makes the Ancestor cast an Elemental Blast when they expire.

Offering From Beyond - More cooldown reduction for Stormkeeper for every ancestor spawned.

Ancestral Swiftness - Should be used on cooldown to get as many Ancestors as possible.

Stormbringer

Tempest - Spending maelstrom has a chance to supercharge the next Lightning Bolt, making it deal much more damage and have an AoE component. It’s possible to have two stacks of this buff.

Arc Discharge - Casting Tempest gives a single Stormkeeper stack. Stormkeeper stacks cap at 4, so you should try to avoid casting Tempest with 4 stacks when possible, although this is unavoidable sometimes unless you’re in AoE and using Chain Lightning.

Rolling Thunder - Reduces Stormkeeper cooldown by 15 seconds. Very strong, and can be combined with Herald Of The Storms to reduce the cooldown to 30 seconds.

Conductive Energy - Makes Tempest not only apply Lightning Rod but also have 10% of its damage dealt to all targets also be dealt to targets with Lightning Rod.

Descending Skies - Guarantees that you always have at least one Tempest at the start of Ascendance, greatly improving consistency.